MENA Minorities

Leon T. Goldsmith from the Sultan Qaboos Unuversity in Oman is the author of a recently published monograph on the Alawites of Syria (I've ordered already). A worth reading piece by him about the current crisis of the Alawites in the light of history can be found on the publishing house's homepage. Is Alawite Solidarity Finally Breaking? by Leon T. Goldsmith On 8 August 2015 large crowds of Alawites demonstrated in Latakia in western Syria , with many demanding the execution of Suleiman Hilal al-Asad, a relative of Bashar al-Asad who murdered—mafia style—the Alawi Colonel Hassan al-Sheikh during an apparent road rage incident . While the regime ordered the arrest of Suleiman, who at the time of writing remains defiant and at large, this incident reflects rising Alawite discontentment with the narrow Asad clique which has been at the centre of Syrian and Alawi power since 1970. Alawites have paid a heavy price in lives in the struggle to preserve Asad rule, a...

I'm cited in the leading French daily Le Monde about the situation in Suweida : Le dilemme de la minorité druze de Syrie Par Laure Stephan et Piotr Smolar Mais pour le journaliste et opposant Fadi Dahouk, réfugié à Beyrouth, cet alignement sur le régime pourrait changer, avec l’essor des Cheikhs de la dignité, une autre milice, formée en 2014 par un religieux druze, cheikh Ouadih Al-Bal’ous.  « Nous sommes contre tous ceux qui nous attaquent.  (…)  Si l’Etat nous attaque, il sera notre ennemi »,  affirme le cheikh, qui a pourtant combattu aux côtés du pouvoir. A Soueida, il a obtenu le retrait de points de contrôle militaires. Il a aussi réclamé le retour de prisonniers.  « Le fait qu’il ait eu gain de cause et qu’il puisse ouvertement critiquer la corruption ou les services de renseignements indique  qu’il a acquis une certaine notoriété, et que le régime ne veut pas se mettre à dos les forces druzes » , analyse le politolog...

Wladimir Glasman, one of France's leading Syria-experts passend away. A former diplomat born in Rabat, he was a devoted and outspoken researcher with a strong passion for the Syrian people. Over the last year he occasionally used to sent me links of videos via Twitter, which I later featured on this blog. To a wider audiance he was propably best known for his great Syria blog on Le Monde using the alias of Leverrier Ignace. May he rest in peace.  Wladimir Glasman 1942-2015 Edit:   Disparition de Wladimir Glasman, compagnon de route de la révolution syrienne par Christophe Ayad, Le Monde Disparition de Wladimir Glasman (1942 – 2015) , ifpo

I'm cited in a report about the Druze in the Israeli occupied Golan Heights featured on Qantara.de, the great online magazine run by Germany's international broadcaster. Squeezed between occupation and civil war   Ylenia Gostoli, Qantara.de (...)Apart from the protest mentioned above, however, most Golanese Druze have distanced themselves from the position of their co-religionists inside Israel. "Over the last decades, the relationships between the Druze in Israel and those in the Golan has been very cold and distant," said Tobias Lang, a political scientist who wrote a book about the Druze minority (...) "The majority of the Druze in Israel serve in the army and accepted a particularistic Israeli-Druze identity, whilst Golani Druze stayed loyal to the motherland." "We don't share most of their demands," said Salman Fakhr Edeen, a resident and researcher at a local human rights NGO. "I myself am against the war. To increase killi...

The Knesset election took place already five month ago, but the traditional paper about the Arab voting behaviour from Tel Aviv University's Konrad Adenauer Center is a welcome opportunity for a supplement. The great thing about the paper is, that you don't have to compile the data of Arab villages from the election commission yourself (not fun at all if you are not literate in Hebrew). Bayan-The Arabs in Israel Issue no. 5, June 2015 (ed. by Itamar Radai & Arik Rudnizky) Let me just highlight a few numbers: The Joint (Arab) List led by Aymen Odeh reached 82.4% in the whole so called Arab sector (i.e. Arab villages and towns including Druze and Circassians - mixed cities with Jewish majority like Haifa or Akko not counted ). If we add the 0.8% of the minor Arab parties who were not part of the Joint List, the Arab parties achieved 83.2% in the Arab sector. This is a rise of 5% compared to the 2013 election. If we have a comparative look at the 2009 election, wh...